Nie Lingli takes a selfie next to her pigs. [China Youth News]

Nie Lingli, a rural woman from Xishui County in Central China's Hubei Province returned to her hometown and started a business raising black small-eared pigs (Xiang Zhu in Chinese), successfully leading about 20 of her fellow villagers to become rich.
With her help, the local industry has brought in tens of millions of yuan income by selling 5,000 black small-eared pigs. Xiang Zhu Mei is now Nie's nickname and she has even registered this name for brand recognition. Mei is used in Chinese to cordially address a young woman.
In 2007, Nie was accepted by a university in southern China's Guangdong Province. After graduation, she started to work in a famous electronics company in that prosperous city, from being an ordinary office staff member to human resource manager.
However, a phone call from her mother changed her life dramatically. Five years ago, she was asked to return to her hometown and help her family raise and sell black small-eared pigs.
Black smaller-eared pigs are rather picky towards food: they only forage and eat rice bran. As a consequence, every bite of the smooth and delicate meat is a treat after proper cooking, being fragrant and delicious even without any seasoning.
In fact, it was her elder brother, Nie Youli, who first brought the Bama black small-eared pigs from Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region into their village and built a farm in their hometown. Nie Youli devoted two years' of time to researches on how to improve the quality of the pigs while at the same time ignoring marketing and advertising, resulting in them having hundreds of pigs that could not be sold and therefore no income could be used to counteract the cost of raising.
Being caught in such a corner, Nie's mother finally asked her to come back to help her brother out. Despite an unwillingness to give up her current opportunity in a big city, she felt obliged to return home and help her family pull through.
The first thing Nie did was to do extensive market research. She found that demand for Bama black small-eared pigs was quite high and the unit price was 160 yuan per kilogram. Being relatively small in size, the sort of pigs her brother raised could only be sold when they reached about 15 kilograms in weight.
Fortunately, she had accumulated a wide range of contacts with those in the middle and upper circle when working as HR in Dongguan, nearby Guangdong's capital city Guangzhou. They were all potential consumers and thus she invited them to come to explore the farm and taste the meat. As long as they came to stay at the farm, they would post on their WeChat moments, functioning as a great advertisement.
What's more, Nie also publicized her products in upscale residential areas, which greatly promoted the sales. Unexpectedly, as Nie's family decided to increase the number of herds of pigs to pay off debts, a new crisis occurred.
As pig-raising is a long payback circle, when the capital chain was broken, construction of the pig farm was impelled to come to a halt. When winter fell, the crowded, cold and hungry pig farm saw hundreds of deaths every day, which made Nie's family desperate.
Luckily, the situation got better when an abandoned henhouse was transformed into the pigs' new house. In order to cope with the financial pressure, Nie Lingli sold her house in the County and borrowed money from whoever she knew. Her family took sand from the river, cut trees, and built bricks themselves for transformation of the sheds.
Later on, the black small-eared pork is vacuumed and put into custom-built gift boxes weighing 2.5 kilograms each, making Bama pork a top priority for a local specialty gift. Seeing the huge profit, local residents wanted a piece of the cake by raising the Bama pigs offered by Nie.
On one occasion, Nie found that the pigs were given concentrated feed instead of organic feed, which would change the taste of the pork and the original intention of green agriculture. In the end, she took the pigs back according to the contract.
Would the story repeat itself if she had too many pigs again?
This time, she discovered a local advantage. Xishui County is a summer resort with vast rape flower fields, which is a highlight that attracts lots of tourists. Why not collaborate with the villas as they share a common benefit? They can buy the black small-eared pigs from her and make them as special dish for tourists.
Besides raising Bama pigs, Nie's family also produces rice dumplings with Bama pork, earthy chicken and eggs. In 2017, Nie's farm sold more than 5,000 pigs. It only took her two years to achieve 10 million yuan income ($1.55 million).
Chen Cheng, secretary of the party committee in Xishui County highly values Nie as a typical example of a returned entrepreneur. He said: "It is very difficult for such a girl with ideas and endurance to attain such an achievement." Nie is often recommended to participate in youth entrepreneurship communication and training camps to learn how to enlarge the market and the industrial chain.
Intellectual talents are a key element in strengthening the industry. However, despite the invitation from Nie, those in large cities are reluctant to give up life there and join her instead.
She realizes that rural youth, lacking capital and technology, are facing great difficulties in starting a business. In addition, they have less credit to borrow from the bank. According to Chen Cheng, it is even harder for rural entrepreneurial women.
"There is more resistance for them. It can not only affect their valuable time as young people, but when a girl get married, she would also experience more perplexities trying to juggle the work with a family life." As in the case of Nie, she has to be separated from her husband, who raises her daughter alone in a different place, while she is always busy with her business.
However hard life is to her, she encourages rural women to try to start their own business boldly. She feels more than happy when customers give praise to the delicious pork she has helped to raise.